When 15-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed. His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border.

Let Me Be Frank with You: A Frank Bascombe Book

In Let Me Be Frank with You, Ford returns with four deftly linked stories narrated by the iconic Bascombe. Now 68, and again ensconced in the well-defended New Jersey suburb of Haddam, Bascombe has thrived - seemingly if not utterly - in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy's devastation. With a flawless comedic sensibility and unblinking intelligence, these stories range over the full complement of American subjects: aging, race, loss, faith, marriage, redemption, the real-estate crash - the tumult of the world we live in.

The Lay of the Land: Frank Bascombe, Book 3

With The Sportswriter, in 1986, Richard Ford commenced a cycle of novels that, 10 years later, after Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, was hailed by The Times of London as "an extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the 20th century itself." Now, a decade later, Frank Bascombe returns, with a new lease on life (and real estate), and more acutely in thrall to life's endless complexities than ever before.

Independence Day: Frank Bascombe, Book 2

Apparently directionless since his divorce, Frank Bascombe migrates from one non-committal relationship to another. He freely indulges his tendencies to self absorption, over-intellectualization, and neurotic ambivalence. But all of that changes one fateful Fourth of July weekend, when, armed with the Declaration of Independence, he embarks on a mission to save his troubled teenaged son.

The Sportswriter: Frank Bascombe, Book 1

In this first volume of his Frank Bascombe trilogy, Bascombe is a sportswriter attempting to cope with his failed marriage and the death of his son. Unable to establish true connections with people, Bascombe drifts into and out of various relationships, but retains an introspective eye that allows him to transcend life's obstacles.

A God in Ruins: A Novel

A God in Ruins tells the dramatic story of the 20th century through Ursula's beloved younger brother, Teddy - would-be poet, heroic pilot, husband, father, and grandfather - as he navigates the perils and progress of a rapidly changing world. After all that Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge is living in a future he never expected to have.

Prudence

On a sweltering day in August 1942, Frankie Washburn returns to his family's rustic Minnesota resort for one last visit before he joins the war as a bombardier headed for the darkened skies over Europe. Awaiting him at the Pines are those he's about to leave behind: his hovering mother, the distant father to whom he's been a disappointment, the Indian caretaker who's been more of a father to him than his own, and Billy, the childhood friend who over the years has become something much more intimate.

Rock Springs: Stories

In these 10 exquisite stories, first published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1987 and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback, Richard Ford mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West - and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there: a refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter and an unhappy girlfriend in a stolen, cranberry-colored Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence.

The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling force and acuity. It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.

Church of Marvels: A Novel

New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs.

All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is 12, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

The Round House: A Novel

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and 13-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared.

The Children Act

Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London presiding over cases in family court. She is fiercely intelligent, well respected, and deeply immersed in the nuances of her particular field of law. Often the outcome of a case seems simple from the outside, the course of action to ensure a child's welfare obvious. But the law requires more rigor than mere pragmatism, and Fiona is expert in considering the sensitivities of culture and religion when handing down her verdicts.

A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel

"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon..." This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture.

The Luminaries

It is 1866 and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky.

Euphoria: A Novel

English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband, Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nell's poor health, are hungry for a new discovery.

We Are Not Ourselves

Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed. When Eileen meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men she grew up with, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to deliver her to the cosmopolitan world she longs to inhabit.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

>In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thailand - Burma Death Railway in 1943, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. His life is a daily struggle to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from pitiless beatings - until he receives a letter that will change him forever.

The Harder They Come: A Novel

Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people - an aging ex-marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son's paranoid, much older lover - as they careen toward an explosive confrontation.

Sweet Tooth

Winner of such prestigious honors as the Booker Prize and Whitbread Award, Ian McEwan is justifiably regarded as a modern master. Set in 1972, Sweet Tooth follows Cambridge student Serena Frome, whose intelligence and beauty land her a job with England's intelligence agency, MI5. In an attempt to monitor writers' politics, MI5 tasks Serena with infiltrating the literary circle of author Tom Healy. But soon matters of trust and identity subvert the operation.

The Lowland

Born just 15 months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and Udayan - charismatic and impulsive - finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty; he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother’s political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America.

The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel of North Korea

Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother - a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang - and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.

TransAtlantic: A Novel

In the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann thrilled readers with a marvelous high-wire act of fiction that The New York Times Book Review called "an emotional tour de force". Now McCann demonstrates once again why he is one of the most acclaimed and essential authors of his generation with a soaring novel that spans continents, leaps centuries, and unites a cast of deftly rendered characters, both real and imagined.

The Burgess Boys: A Novel

Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their Maine hometown of Shirley Falls for New York City as soon as they possibly could. Jim, a sleek, successful corporate lawyer, has belittled his bighearted brother their whole lives, and Bob, a Legal Aid attorney who idolizes Jim, has always taken it in stride. But their long-standing dynamic is upended when their sister, Susan - the Burgess sibling who stayed behind - urgently calls them home.

The Invention of Wings: A Novel

From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees, a magnificent novel about two unforgettable American women. Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world - and it is now the newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection. Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.

Publisher's Summary

"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later."

When 15-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed.

His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American whose cool reserve masks a dark and violent nature.

Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he knew. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.

A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of our greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a classic.

There are only a very few books I've listened to twice in immediate succession. After I finished it the second time, I had to wait a couple of days before I could read any other book, in either print or sound This is not only one of the best audiobooks I've experienced; it's one of the best books I've ever read. I'll be buying a print copy to pass around my family.

I've always liked Richard Ford (especially The Lay of the Land), and this book was something of a surprise. You can see the connections with his other work, but this seems to have sprung all at once (a very focused and intense book) from some rather different place. I wish Ford a long and productive life! And I thank him for this book.

The plot of Canada isn't all that interesting as it would be described--"Two childrens' lives are changed forever when their parents rob a bank". However, the writing is wonderful and the plot lifts off into something out-of-this world. The narrator is so good that you don't think about him twice. Sometimes a narrator soars with accents and voices, but Holter Graham simply reads this so well, that you can't imagine anyone else doing it. I enjoyed Canada so very much that I might listen to it a second time. I recommend it without reservation.

This was a very good book; fascinating to listen to. The story moved along exploring the thoughts and feelings of the protagonist, as he was trying to figure out what he WAS thinking and feeling, and how that related to what was actually happening. The narrator was first rate. Not many novels manage to investigate those wiggles in life which could move a person this way or that. I'd like to see the sister's story. Bravo. Thanks, guys.

I would have given up about a third of the way through if I was reading this book. The narration of the audio version made it possible to stick with it until the end. A fifteen year old boy is shipped off to the Canadian "outback" after his parents commit a crime in the USA.. Much of the first half of the novel deals with the lead up to the crime from the boy's point of view. Once in Canada in the second half, he tells us what happened to him there in the first six months or so in great detail. I found it all rather tedious going. Then the story skips ahead many years for a brief summing up. I have enjoyed other Richard Ford novels but this one, not so much.

Are some people simply “amoral,” neither moral nor immoral? Are there people who truly believe that their wants and needs justify any action, even murder, if it is required for satisfying their wants?

Teenage fraternal twins, Dell and his sister Berner have a father with this outlook. After the father is “pushed” out of his Air Force career, although with an honorable discharge, and is unable to hold jobs for which he considers himself highly qualified, he needs money. So, he robs a bank and a man is killed. He implicates his wife and both are sent to prison.

The twins are left with $500, fears of being sent to orphanages, very little time for decisions and their mother’s plan for them to be cared for by the brother of an old friend in Saskatchewan, Canada. Berner takes the money and runs away to live on her own. Dell is left to be sent to Canada. Ford addresses how seemingly single decisions can impact generations of lives.

Fifteen year-old Dell faces life in a strange, cold, hard environment, living in virtual solitude in an “overflow shack” among strangers. His saving grace is a decision he had made when he was younger. He loved school and learning. He wanted to learn everything in the world. He grows in maturity and in confidence as he learns to live within himself and his circumstances. He learns to adjust to his new life, where there is no school, and still hold on to his decisions to go to school and learn someday. And then he is confronted by an event beyond his control.

He is forced to make decisions that should not be faced by a fifteen year- old. He is drawn into the life of of another totally amoral man. Arthur simply does not think of his actions as being immoral or moral. He simply acts as required to get what he wants. No anger. No animosity. No hard feelings. No regrets. Same as leaving small animals as roadkill.

Richard Ford writes thought provoking books. This one also has suspense and interesting (for someone who shivers when the temp drops below 70 F)information about living north of even Montana.

It is a compelling read (listen) with an excellent narrator. I recommend it.

What seemed like a great premise was turned dull by the writer using words, so many unnecessary words, as filler and never really getting anywhere. You'd think bankrobbing parents and a murder would make for a great read but what this book needed was a great editor and someone to say "Get to the point, already!" I stuck with it through Part 2 because of the narrator, Holter Graham, who I'd just heard narrate a great book, "The Art of Fielding", but even Mr. Graham could not save this book - too bad, it sounded like a potentially great story.

I think the initial premise works well, and the exploration was compelling:: confused and disoriented child flung about and dismantled emotionally by the incongruities and reversals of fortune which are visited upon his parents, themselves victims of incompetent parenting. Add to this the flippant handing off of the child to an estranged brother in another country and subsequent culture shock and immersion into what for the average person would be intolerable circumstances. But Dell soldiers on, even managing to up his position on the back-country food chain.

The second part of the book - although these sections are not officially partitioned - evolves more into a bush country "guns and robbers" period piece, with all the conventionally colorful characters one is used to meeting in a border community. I find such people to be interesting from a visual standpoint, as if regarded in some sort of retro catalogue, but ultimately they are children, inwardly self-loathing, pathologically attached and grasping. This would all compel me to read faster and with more urgency, but the angle did not hold my interest, as Dell's introspection on all this just about disappears.

I like Holter Graham as a narrator. His prose readings are smooth, character-driven and as good and vivid as any performance you'd see on the big screen. The loud, anxious whining of characters in trouble in earlier narrations has disappeared, and that's all to the good.

I'll only give this a 4 out of 5, simply because of the disconnect between the first and second sections.

Definitely readable; I'd just like to see more of the protagonist's perspective.

Richard Ford has been a favorite of mine - and many - for years, but this novel is the best he has ever written. A spare and thoughtful meditation on time, family, history, mystery and their effects on a young boy, the book has a wonderful narration with just the right tone to capture the spare and beautiful language Ford uses. Only once in the past decade have I gone out and bought a book after listening to it and this is the one. I want to go back and reread it - savor the words and the images. The audio version helps imagine the openness of the skies, solitary and reflective nature of the book's protagonist, and it speaks to all who have painful memories and unanswered questions in our lives. And that would be all of us. A simply wonderful book.

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